Saturday, February 26, 2005

Grid overview presentation at ACM

I gave this talk at the SF Bay ACM meeting last October


They posted the slides, which were the first part of my half day
tutorial at CMG04 in December. The talk went well, was well attended and I caught up with some old friends afterwards.

Extended Accounting in Solaris 8-10

This is a very under-used facility introduced in Solaris 8. Solaris 10
extends it so that you can get TCP flow accounting as well as extended
process accounting info. It also adds a perl interface.

Unlike traditional unix accounting - which is low overhead but stores
very poor quality information - extended accounting can save data at
fixed time intervals (as well as at process termination). It can be
configured to store detailed information, and in Solaris 10 since
microstate accounting is enabled for all processes by default you can
get the microstate details for everything with no extra overhead. I'll
be digging into the details of how to configure and process this data
soon.

Friday, February 25, 2005

Motivation

I started this blog, but didn't get far with it last summer. I just updated it and aim to be much more active, as I'm collecting information on free performance and capacity planning tools and want a place to share it.

For those that know me from my books, I left Sun last summer and started work at eBay in the Operations Architecture group in September 2004.